Shared Futures

Hawai'i Pacific University

Nancy L. Hedlund
Associate Vice President of Planning & Assessment; Professor of Psychology
nhedlund@hpu.edu

The overall goals of the project are to create a network for collaboration across the participating colleges and universities to design general education curricula organized around global learning goals, and to work with AAC&U staff on the Faculty Development Institute. The key areas for summarizing my experiences, skills, and know-how related to these goals, in addition to professional background, are:  1) communication to support collaboration and change, 2) global learning, and 3) general education and curriculum development.

Professional Background:  I have studied at the graduate level in Social Psychology (Ph.D., Columbia), Education (M.Ed., Teachers College), and Human Ecology (M.S., U. Oklahoma). I am a social psychologist with training and background in conflict resolution: peace, justice, communication, and dynamics of organizations/ systems. My work has always fit within the established domain of social psychology called organizational development or “OD.”  I have taught in graduate programs and led evaluation and quality assurance in universities and medical centers.

Communication and Collaboration: I have logged many experiences in organizations in which I led committees, teams, research teams, and staff development activities. Most recently, I led our school through its first venture with formal strategic planning and, simultaneously, its application for reaccreditation with the Western region (which resulted in the school’s first ten-year decision).  My current interests include: fostering adaptation to change by individuals and groups; the foundation and meanings of citizenship; and the goal of becoming a more international person. 

Global Learning. My experience includes limited but interesting travel through much of my life until moving to Hawai‘i, a region of the world in which no ethnic group is a majority. Overall, I have traveled to/in Central America, Japan, the Marshall Islands, France, China and Croatia. I also spent several years working part-time in a participatory research project in a Native Hawaiian community. At HPU, life is truly global and international because we have a long-standing pattern of student enrollment of 1/4 to 1/3 international students from 100 and more countries. I have taught and learned with these students (psychology, research methods, statistics), but have no experience teaching global or international content.

General Education & Curriculum Development. In the past, I have led curriculum committees and helped develop new programs. Most recently, I chaired HPU’s review of its outdated general education program, leading up to the past two years’ work to construct a new curriculum. We have long had “Five Themes” curriculum themes named as the basis for our general education, but these themes were not really integrated into the curriculum. The Themes are:  Global Systems; World Cultures; Research and Epistemology; Communication; and Values and Choices. The program review did not get as far as learning assessments because we found the curriculum to be too disconnected from the Themes. A new curriculum has been designed and is in a phased implementation. I co-lead, with Dr. Micheline Soong, a group now working on developing a “first-year seminar” that will focus on (a) global citizenship and (b) transition to college, with a discipline context and a topic to organize the content of the course. Examples of topics are: human rights, sustainability, world hunger, etc. (no limits really).

Micheline Soong
Assistant Professor in English
msoong@hpu.edu

The overall goals of the project are to create a network for collaboration across the participating colleges and universities to design general education curricula organized around global learning goals, and to work with AAC&U staff on the Faculty Development Institute. My experiences, skills, and know-how related to these goals are: personal cross-cultural background, professional areas of interest, and curriculum development, from the teaching rather than the administrative end.

Personal cross-cultural background: Born and raised in Hawaii to a culturally mixed household (third-generation Episcopalian/Chinese/American father, first-generation Catholic/Chinese/French Polynesian mother), I studied Cantonese, Mandarin, and Hakka since grade school, and was encouraged to travel abroad as early as 7th grade—to Hiroshima, Japan, as a YMCA Peace Delegate, and later to Beijing, PRC, and Tunghai, ROC, as a summer Chinese language and culture student in high school and college. As a graduate student, I lived a year in Yokohama, Japan, attending the Stanford Inter-University Center. My early experiences traveling abroad exposed me to the peculiar ways in which identity is relative to the context in which one finds one’s self. In Hawaii, I am Oriental or Chinese; in China, I am American; in Taiwan, I am Overseas Chinese; in Japan, I am American of Chinese-descent, and in California, I am Asian American. This experience of identity fragmentation shaped my understanding of essentialist versus constructionist conceptualizations of self—how can some people be so certain of who they think they are?  

Professional areas of interest: My love of learning languages (Chinese, Japanese, Latin, and Greek) and reading literature and literary theory evolved into the pursuit of a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature (Japanese, Chinese, and Asian American Literatures) from UCLA. It was there that I cultivated the intellectual passion for the sticky issues of identity politics as shaped by gender, race, ethnicity, culture, class, sexual orientation and sexuality. My scholarship’s focus is on the ways in which marginalized groups create narrative voices that challenge systemic forms of cultural and socio-economic erasure as represented in literature.

Curricular development: In the courses that I teach at HPU (such as 20th Century American Women Writers of Color and World Literature I and II), I endeavor to expose students to how their very different backgrounds shape each person’s engagement with each literary text encountered in the class. Creating this self-awareness of “deep cultural” socialization and acknowledging the wealth of differing viewpoints in each class is the first step in opening up the conversation of what makes a person truly global as opposed to just being an international tourist. Working on the planning of five of the past student symposia on global citizenship, I have structured my students’ participation in the symposia as an integral part of the course, from writing essays, preparing presentations, to facilitating discussion. My main focus has been to get students to make connections between their personal interactions with the literary texts’ treatment of identity politics and an application of those same concepts to each student’s own personal exploration of what it means to be an engaged citizen in a global context as they progress in their undergraduate educational journey at HPU.